


La Mer

by Hyb



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, cellist!Bard, crimes against the english language, pained use of song lyrics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 07:56:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3242114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/Hyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Bard plays the cello, and Thranduil thinks it's a karaoke party.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Mer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wolfhalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfhalls/gifts).



> Crack, crack, I am so sorry I really am. I needed some fluff in my life, okay? You should maybe not read this. You should actually go read [janegreys](http://archiveofourown.org/series/199742) instead. Especially because she posted a sequel four days ago and I didn't realize until just now. I would say go read that instead. This is unrevised crack. This is a gift in the preschool sense where you think someone is really cool so you throw Play-Doh at her head.

The house belongs to a lady named Galadriel. Her smiles are always secrets, and Bard feels that he is being laughed at but cannot begrudge her amusement.

The party the lady hosts is lit by candles drifting in endless crystal bowls, bobbing in vases like ships. The faceted golden light does not yield the privacy of a concert hall, the audience politely shrouded beyond view of the stage. Bard tucks his knees beneath the ribs of his cello, leans his chin over her neck, and spares one rueful glance for his scuffed shoes. If Sigrid were home, not off padding her intimidating transcript hundreds of miles away, she would have reminded him to polish them.

But he is only here to play, not to look like he draws more than a flagging orchestra's salary. So he plays.

There is no fear of being overshadowed, even if he might wish to retreat into the woodwork. The party is so civilized Bard fears it is actually a fete or a gala and he would not know what to do with either. The women wear gowns like tissue and strands of silver and gold like spidersilk, mirages shimmering at the edge of his vision. Too polished to be true. Kath had looked a dream in a long dress with her curls piled high, but she also had hard callused fingertips from a lifetime at the guitar, she swore in five different languages so the children would never catch her at it, and she would have taken beer over champagne any day.

Even the men speak sotto voce, slanting knowing looks to their companions. Bard gives them civilized music: Bach, Schumann, Rachmaninoff. He finds it easier to play when he avoids glancing about, breathes in with the familiar, humming ache of his arm. 

Pale hair falls across his sight, impossible to ignore even without the spill of warm breath near his face. The man in the dove gray suit is bent to speak with him, and Bard sees his mouth stained with wine. He halts the next sonata before it is begun, and stares back until the man withdraws an inch, amused. This close, Bard can see the fissure of a scar up one side of his face. Painted over, only the flickering light gives it away, casts shadows where there ought to be none.

“Beyond the sea.”

Bard must look baffled, because the man makes a moue. His eyes don't match, one blown dark and devouring, one awash in incinerating blue. He seemed slender at first glance. Only the cut of his suit, it seems, as he stands upright and Bard is made small by the breadth of his shoulders, chest deep as a sail against the wind.

“The song. Can you play it or not?” Without seeming to look, the man sets his empty glass upon the tray of a passing server, and seizes another. He drinks it like water and does not blink.

“I can play it,” Bard agrees. “La Mer” was meant for a piano, but he can make do. The melody is not so complicated, familiar like childhood. And if the lady does not want her guests making requests, she ought to cut them off sooner. He tests the first few bars and waits for the man to step away. Instead he lays his hand over the strings, and Bard glowers before he can stop himself.

“Slower,” the pale man insists, burning at Bard like he ought to understand. He plays again, is told slower again, and by the time he is allowed to begin the song in earnest it feels like a funeral dirge.

By now Galadriel is watching from beyond the champagne fountain, turning her chin to speak to a man in a sober suit without taking her eyes from the scene at the cello. 

He plays, and the man in gray sings.

 _Somewhere beyond the sea_  
_Somewhere waiting for me_  
_My lover stands on golden sands_  
_And watches the ships that go sailing_

The man in gray sings like scraping stone, slow and unsteady. His eyes are hooded, and there is no joke in his bearing. He demands the attention of the room and it is granted to him as easily as pulling in air.

 _Somewhere beyond the sea_  
_She's there watching for me_  
_If I could fly like birds on high_  
_Then straight to her arms_  
_I'd go sailing_

If anything, he seems to slow, and Bard is forced to drag out a mournful note in answer. 

There were a few twinkles of raised glasses when Bard began to play, eyes flickering bright with recognition. They have all gone still now. The man in gray clutches his wine as if it is the only microphone he could require, all excruciating dignity even when he grips the back of Bard's chair for support. 

The same hand comes to rest heavy between his shoulders instead, and Bard nearly stutters the draw of the bow.

 _It's far beyond the stars_  
_It's near beyond the moon_  
_I know beyond a doubt_  
_My heart will lead me there soon_

The voice above his head has broken, recovered at a rasp. When Bard glances out, he sees thin hands covering mouths, mortified glances ringed in white. This is not a place for clumsy soul baring, and it might be kinder to stop playing altogether. 

But Bard's eyes are hot, and stopping is not a choice. This is not for him, this drunken embarrassment of a man and his song. Still there is broken glass in his lungs, and it feels like a hum of understanding between them. The ache that never ends, that wakes you years later to a cold bed. The ache when you forget, long enough to remember again. 

_We'll meet beyond the shore_  
_We'll kiss just as before_  
_Happy we'll be beyond the sea_  
_And never again will I go sailing_

The man in gray sways, leans too much of his weight on Bard, and Bard looks up to see the silvered stripe down his cheek. Only one. The scarred side remains dry.

The man in the sober suit is abruptly near. He takes the man in gray by the elbow, and turns his high brow on Bard. With his dark hair receding into a severe widow's peak, his stare of disapproval is harrowing. A younger man in an equally conservative suit appears as if from his shadow, handing over a billfold.

“You will see Thranduil home,” he instructs. And Bard thinks, yes, that is exactly what he will do. “Galadriel will pay you in full for the evening.” He yanks the man in gray, Thranduil, in hard by the elbow when he tries to storm away. Bard hears glass shatter. Crisp, rustling bills are tucked into Bard's breast pocket. He does not attempt to refuse them.

“There is a cab outside. See him home, and yourself. Keep the rest. Can you do this?” But Bard is already nodding, tucking his cello back into her case with a single absent stroke of the waist like goodnight. 

An address is provided, but in truth he remembers the way.

 

 

Thranduil sulks on the way. So Bard thinks, until he sees a pale brow pressed against the cold glass, hair fallen into disarray. Then he slumps, curls the great length of himself into the narrow seat. His head jostles on Bard's knee at every bump in the road, his shins shoved against the front seat. He does not cry again, or not so Bard can see.

 

 

Thranduil decides that he will sleep on his kitchen floor. Bard can hardly lift him, so the kitchen floor it will be. The hardwood is clean if uncomfortable, and he finds a tasseled cushion to shove under Thranduil's head. He gets kicked for his trouble when he tugs off narrow crocodile oxfords polished to a glassy sheen. The toes are pointed, his ribs will be bruised come morning. After that, wrestling the overgrown child out of his jacket brings him a hot flash of satisfaction.

With his unwitting host drowsing under an angora throw, Bard sits at a picture window and calls his children. Sigrid is buried in century old government documents and mouths her way through pleasantries, reminds him to thaw one of her casseroles for the week. Tilda talks over Bain on the phone from their grandmother's, but they are happy and full of more pie and ice cream than they are letting on.

Bard kicks his shoes off, considers. Folds himself into the window seat and sleeps until dawn.

 

 

“Why are you still here?” 

Bard opens his eyes to see that Thranduil has traded his rumpled suit for a dressing gown held high at the neck. His teeth have been brushed white, but there's a wine dark ring along his lip that shows when he speaks.

“Well if you choked on your own vomit I was going to lift a few antiques on my way out,” he grumbles, bleary and aching for coffee. The crick in his neck will be hell, that he knows. “But here you are.”

Thranduil is still staring, hair spilling over his shoulder as he tilts his head.

“Have we met?”

And isn't that the question.

“Last night,” he grouses, rising and twisting until his spine pops like fireworks. “You were drunk. You sang. D'you remember any of that?”

“Perfectly well,” Thranduil snaps. To his credit, he does not color, doesn't look away. Then Bard spies the cup of coffee in his hands, with no second in sight, and his charitable feeling dampens. Thranduil's fingers are still warm from the mug when he snatches Bard's hand, turns over his palm in the light. Traces over Bard's knuckles until he feels a hot flush creep up his neck. 

“You're the rough trade that wasn't,” Thranduil declares. He sounds so certain, for a moment Bard feels inclined to nod.

“Wait. No. What did you call me?” The sun is warm at his back, he must have misheard. “You hired me for some odd jobs, three, four years ago, you remember that?”

“Oh, I remember.” Thranduil's voice dips lower, and he sits beside Bard heedless of the press of their shoulders, the hot jolt of connection from knee to hip. “You were loitering about that rough neighborhood, wearing a leather jacket in May.”

“Well I'm sure it was cold!” Bard tugs his hand back with a scowl. Thranduil is untroubled by this obstruction. He begins to roll up Bard's sleeve, prodding his forearm like a lamb shank at market. 

Bard steals his coffee, though it sloshes hot up his wrist for the effort. There is no sweetness to be found, but it's heady with cream and he drains half in one gulp. 

“I saw you standing at the corner,” Thranduil continues, amused.

“A corner, streets have corners, stop making it sound so shady,” Bard grumbles. He watches Thranduil lay fingertips over the freckles on his arm, making patterns like constellations. “When some rich bastard pulls up not half a block from Homebase and offers you 'a hundred an hour', you get in his ridiculous car and go. I wasn't even looking for work, you realize?”

“It became readily apparent that a misunderstanding was had,” Thranduil strokes Bard's hair back from his cheek. Bard sucks in a breath and holds it. “Once that was made clear, I could hardly tell you how fine you would look on your back.” Thranduil looks him in the eye and Bard could not be more still with a knife to his throat. 

“You were quite awful, actually. But the hands were lovely. That I recall. Vividly.”

“Well I'm not a handyman and I'm not a hooker,” Bard manages over the blood beat in his ears. Thranduil's robe has parted over a clean slice of skin down his chest. “Wasn't going to say no to one overpaid afternoon before you figured that out, though. Your business if you want to be hiring people off street corners.”

“Instead I find a cellist. What a surprise.” Thranduil gathers up Bard's fingers in the cage of his hands, raises them so near his lips that for a dizzy moment Bard thinks they will be kissed. He nestles the empty mug against the window before he has the chance to drop it.

“When you found me at the party. I thought you'd recognized me.” This of all things brings the blood to his cheeks. 

“I was not in a fit state to recognize anyone. As I'm sure you recall.” There is no shame in his admission, no shame when he scrapes his teeth under the pad of Bard's middle finger. He has kept his right side to Bard all this while, his one eye keen and watchful. “Singing never was my forte. But you conducted yourself admirably all the same.”

“You broke my bleeding heart up there.” Bard breathes past the glass in his lungs, cranes his neck up to a ceiling so high it seems they are seated at a pew at church, waiting to be absolved. Thranduil's scrutiny weighs upon his skin like the rush of air before a blow. “I'd have played all night if you asked me.”

“How long?” His voice is wind through dead branches. 

“Six. Six years.” Bard's gut drops like a stone.

“Nine.” Thranduil cranes his neck up to match, and they watch the rose dawn banish the gray.

“So we're both fools,” Bard says when he trusts himself to speak. “I thought you were handsome, even if you were daft. You could have just said hello like a normal person–”

The fingers threading through his hair warn him before Thranduil swoops to kiss him, grips Bard's jaw so tight he thinks he'll never move again. All a blur, after that. If ever Bard knew tricks, he's forgotten them, but he doesn't mind the taste of coffee and toothpaste. The heat they breathe into each other turns molten, it could burn him out from the inside. 

Thranduil murmurs something, lost in the crush of their lips. Bard draws back enough to blink at him. The window is cold at his back compared to the scalding breath fanning between them.

“Hello,” Thranduil repeats. His heavy brows arch, smug as his swollen mouth is hopeful. 

Bard seizes a handful of that insufferable hair and kisses him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Pretty sure I just disgorged all that so I'd have an excuse for a smutty follow up.


End file.
